


From Things Divine

by pikestaff



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: All Templars Are Bastards, F/M, One Shot, POV Minor Character, Post-DA2, some blood and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 07:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11352822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikestaff/pseuds/pikestaff
Summary: During the Mage Rebellion, a little girl learns that Hawke and Anders basically have two modes.  Sickeningly violent-- and sickeningly sappy.





	From Things Divine

**Author's Note:**

> As prompted by my Salt Squad friends, against_stars and emberkeelty. :3

The apprentice girl was about thirteen when it happened.

And when it did happen it seemed unreal, almost. Like out of one of the storybooks her parents used to read to her before the templars came to her home and put her in chains and dragged her away.

Templars were involved this particular time, too. They came into the dormitory late one night and locked the doors behind them. “Alright, listen up everyone,” said the most senior of them. “Everybody stay calm. This is for your safety. There are intruders in the tower and they will be taken care of. Until then, stay in your beds.”

They didn’t say anything else. But the girl happened to be in the bed that was closest to the door, and she pulled the blankets over her head and pretended to be asleep and then she carefully, _carefully_ turned herself around under the covers and inched towards the foot of the bed. Then she made a little opening in her blankets next to her ear. It was dark, so they couldn’t see.

That’s how she caught snatches of words that the templars were saying to each other. “Abomination,” they said, “That fucking mage and her fucking abomination.” “Should’ve killed them all when we had the chance.” One templar, who looked to be junior to the others, was genuinely scared and kept asking “Do you think they’ll get this far? They can’t possibly expect— two against all of us, they can’t expect that to go their way, right?”

“I hear they’ve got friends,” said the man in charge. “Other mages they’ve freed.”

A third spoke up. “I thought we were going to… proceed with… the Right.”

“I bloody well wish we could,” said the first. “But we need official word for that. If I had my way, we’d be doing it anyway. Fucking mages. None of this would have happened if we could just kill them the moment their magic shows up.”

The girl hid herself under the covers again. She hated templars. Hated them. Especially now that she was getting older. She saw the way they looked at the older girls. She knew they would start looking like that at her, soon, and it made her feel filthy and wrong.

She wondered if abominations were actually attacking the tower. And if so, she wondered if they were truly worse than the templars.

Ultimately, when it happened, it all happened very quickly. There was yelling and screams and sparks and the crunch of bone and steel clattering against the ground and the girl, who was still hidden deep under the covers just in case, heard a templar shout something— she didn’t hear what— followed by a loud, booming voice exclaiming “ _You have only brought this on yourself!_ ”

There was more chaos, then, and the girl couldn’t help but peek through the blankets. She saw a glowing man, burning and resplendent and piercing through the night like a shooting star, killing a templar with one swift sweep of his staff, and at his back, lit by the man’s bright blue glow, was a woman moving in perfect harmony with him as she cast a shock of lightning into another templar before shoving the bladed end of her staff into his head as he fell.

The girl hid under the blankets again, suddenly scared by the grisly sight, but soon after the sounds tapered off and disappeared somewhere down the hall, and then there was only silence and the girl slowly poked her head through the blanket at the edge of the bed.

All the templars were dead. All of them. Their blood was pooling on the floor and the walls were crisscrossed with the telltale signs of a terrifying and deadly magical onslaught— here there was a coating of ice, here scorch marks and soot, here a hole that had been bashed in by heavy armor thrown against it— and every last templar was dead.

The girl looked over at the rest of the room. The other apprentices were, slowly, peeping out of their blankets and climbing out of their own beds to assess the damage. Soon most of them were crowded around, looking at the dead templars in awe.

“What happened?” one boy asked. “Did anyone see?”

“ _I_ saw!” said an elf boy. “Two mages came in— and one was all blue and glowing. They killed everyone. Everyone!”

The apprentices continued to gape and the girl was just starting to wonder what would happen to them now when she heard noises from down the hall. Most of the other young apprentices ran back to their beds upon hearing the sounds, but the girl didn’t. Because the voices weren’t scary ones— they were quiet ones. Soft ones. Good ones.

She inched to the open door, stepping over a templar to get there, and poked her head out. The two mages she’d seen earlier were slowly walking down the hall towards her. The man had feathers on his shoulders— and, notably, was no longer glowing— and the woman was covered in spikes.

They were holding hands.

“That was quick,” the woman quipped. She had short hair and piercing eyes and she was covered in blood, not that she seemed to mind. “The templars seemed particularly incompetent here.”

The man laughed and looked over at the woman and his eyes sparkled with love. “Just when I thought they couldn’t get any _more_ incompetent.”

“I mean, we might have to give the ones in that dormitory credit for holding out for, what, maybe half a minute?”

“They might have reached a full minute. I forgot to keep count this time. I hope you’ll forgive me.” The man in the feathery coat looked over at the woman with exaggerated puppy dog eyes, and she laughed and grabbed him and the two of them kissed, suddenly, and it was tender and gentle, just like in the girl’s stories. Then they pulled apart but kept their foreheads pressed together as they had a moment. “You’re the marrow in my bones, you know,” the man said suddenly.

“Mmm.” The woman gently ran a finger across his stubbled chin. “I can top that.”

“Can you?”

“You,” she said dramatically, “Are lodged in my heart the way jerky gets lodged in my teeth.”

And both of them laughed and then continued walking towards the dormitory. The girl gave a little gasp and pulled back, tripping over a templar’s corpse and falling rather roughly on her behind. But just moments later the man and woman were in the room, speaking soothing words as they helped her up. “It’s alright now,” said the man with the feathered coat, and his voice was soft. “We’re here to help you.”

“We have other mages coming to get you out of here,” said the woman. She looked down rather disdainfully at the templar corpse at her feet and kicked it. “I think you’ll find them a far sight better than… these… lovely individuals.” She looked back up at the girl. Her eyes were steely. “They won’t hurt you anymore. No one will. We’ll make sure of it.”

The girl believed them.

The man and woman stayed with them until the other mages arrived, and then they left as quickly as they’d come. And the girl never saw them again, but occasionally, years later, she’d see a feather on the wind or an elderly couple in love and she’d remember.

The storybooks, it seemed, were sometimes true.

**Author's Note:**

> I literally wrote this in 40 minutes I have no idea if it's any good.
> 
> \---
> 
> http://pikestaff.tumblr.com


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